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It has, for most of my life, been a source of quiet joy, and, at times, comfort. I have, throughout my life, used walking as a way of thinking through things and tending to my emotional life; as a way of reminding myself of the myriad of small things and encounters in that world that spark my curiosity, and that the world is bigger than my thoughts. Walking, too, has been a gentle act of engaging or re-engaging with my body. Having my feet on the ground, and feeling my way through locomotion has been a way of checking in with myself. Walking, for much of my adult life, has been my main mode of transportation, since I have never owned a car.

I will love walking again, I know.

But for the time being, walking is a source of considerable anxiety and often pain for me.

The bones in my left ankle have healed around the breaks, but my body has also grown scar tissue around that, and at the front of my ankle. The tissues in my foot have seized up and are reluctant to relax. These tissues now hold memories of considerable trauma, and of the fear that came with that. I suffered from agoraphobia for sometime after the accident—terrified of being knocked over once again by someone not paying enough attention—while simultaneously feeling suffocated and trapped in my own apartment. (I was literally trapped for some time, able to leave, but unable to re-enter the building without assistance because of the layout of the front security door.)

The skin on my ankle, foot and lower leg is tender to touch, like a bruise. This is especially so around the surgical scars.

My left leg withered away somewhat when I wasn’t using it and was using crutches instead. It is still smaller than my right.

To walk is an effort, even for very short distances. I’m told I walk like I have a wedgie, and this makes me laugh, but also makes me want to cry. My foot and ankle get very tired and swell up if I walk very much during a day, and my knee and hip are suffering too, since they are trying to compensate for the lack of mobility in my ankle.

Stairs are the hardest. They force the ankle into an angle it no longer likes.

I miss walking. I miss being able to stroll. I miss it more than I could have expected when I sat on the road looking at the very wrong angle my ankle sat at immediately after the accident.

I miss walking. I miss the sense of purpose and self-sufficiency it can give me. I miss the feeling of capability in my body. I miss the feeling of strength in my legs. I am questioning the sense of self I had smugly built on the premise of being able-bodied and fit.

I will walk freely and joyfully again. I am determined, and I am doing everything in my power to get to that place. But I also feel guilty about this grief I feel, given my predicament is temporary, and I don’t know what to do with that.

This is a mental wavering I wish I could walk my way through.

Soon enough, I suppose, I will.

There is a tenderness towards myself and my learning again how to walk, too.

It is fascinating to feel the stiffness start to slowly, slowly give way, and to learn about how scar tissue works and what’s happening when the physio is moving my foot around—traction. My left foot and ankle are still redder than—and sometimes purple—my right because my body is keeping up a higher blood supply to aid in healing. Learning this softens the way I look at and think about the oddness of my left foot and ankle, and reminds me that I can feel tenderness towards myself, not only frustration. It reminds me of the immense amount of quiet work my body is doing, trying to repair the damage of the accident and the surgeries that followed.

Walking, then, and all the additional frustration, discomfort and pain it brings with it for me right now, is perhaps an ongoing lesson not only in what it means to be frail, but also what it means to be pouring energy into healing. The walking is, of course, also how my body is processing the recovery from this injury; how I am re-learning its boundaries now that they also encompass scar tissue and titanium.

I am, then, perhaps, still walking my way through this, determinedly, trying to find a way of being comfortable enough with calamity and joy occurring simultaneously.

Balanced on one leg, I run water into a plastic tub in the bath. I splash some gentle liquid soap into the tub, and then sit on a chair next to the bath to spray some of the same soap through my hair before I comb it and tie it back up in a plait.

I turn the tap off, test the warmth of the water in the plastic tub, and carefully take my clothes off, easing my heavy moon boot through the leg hole of my underwear, and laying the clothes over the bath, within arm’s reach.

It has been nearly two weeks since I was hit by a car while riding home on my bicycle.

The accident dislocated and broke my ankle badly enough that when I was first admitted to hospital, high on pain medication from the ambulance ride, all the medical staff winced at it, and I have since been reminded of its severity many times by doctors and radiographers and nurses and surgeons. My ankle is now full of metal plates and screws.

I sit on the chair next to the bath and use a wash cloth to wipe the warm soapy water over my skin. I am not yet strong enough to lower myself in and out of the bath without help, and we’re still figuring out how best to put the chair in the shower so that I can reach my crutches and get my moon boot on and off without putting any weight on the broken ankle.

Tenderness has been the quiet surprise for me in the wake of this accident.

It hasn’t surprised me so much from others. My man and my parents and my friends have all responded to this with great tenderness and care, and I am forever grateful for this.

What has surprised me, though, is my own tenderness towards myself.

It started as I sat on the road in the immediate aftermath of the accident, shocked, frightened, and in pain. People rushed around me to arrange ambulances and police and blankets because I was in shock. I just gently cradled my leg so my foot could remain off the ground, and reminded myself to breathe slowly.

When I’ve woken in the night since, crying and feeling the fear of that time on the road catch up with me, it’s been tenderness that I’ve offered that part of myself. And this, I think, is the growing of a certain kind of strength. Just as it took a considerable amount of core physical strength to sit on the road for that long, balancing so that one foot could hang in the air, I’m coming to realise that it takes a mostly unseen gentle strength to offer ourselves kindness and tenderness when we need it — especially when so much in our culture encourages us to push ourselves to achieve one thing or another.

In the bathroom, having washed most of my body, I gently lower myself to sit on a towel on the floor next to the bath. One by one, I open the velcro fastenings on the front of the boot, and lift my leg out of it to sit it on the floor. Very gently, I remove the surgical sock, careful not to twist or pressure the ankle, and lay the leg back on the floor. It is bruised and swollen; yellow, pink and bluey grey. Some of the skin is grazed, and there are long straight surgical wounds. The muscles have lost all their tone, having remained unused for so many days now.

The skin on this leg is itself tender, and can only be touched very lightly. Today, I find myself thinking gently towards the leg too, where before there was considerably more frustration towards this part of my body. Seeing the wounds so clearly, and tending to them, has all but dissolved this particular frustration. This tenderness feels like accepting this withered and sore lower limb as part of me again. I had not realised until this moment that I’d even separated it out in the first place.

There will be a part of me that misses this bathing when my ankle is healed. Slowing down so much has also been incredibly frustrating and sometimes upsetting, but this long, slow lesson in tenderness towards myself is one I hope I will not forget. There is something deeply beautiful in learning the value in treating ourselves the way we might hope to be treated by others when we’re having difficulty.

Washed and dried, the return of my leg to the sock and boot is just as much a gentle exercise, as is getting redressed and packing up the washing paraphernalia. I am more aware of the small spaces my body moves through to achieve these small things, and of the texture of the materials I am covering myself with. I am more aware of what it takes to shift my relationship with those spaces and materials by moving through, with or around them.

A hundred… I can never remember what the ‘mg’, or whatever it is, stands for, I say.

Micrograms, she says, and writes it on the pathology order form.

It seems ridiculous that I am so reliant on such a small measure.

Later, in the pathology collection room, the nurse sits next to me typing the details from the form into the computer. She has her mobile phone on the desk in front of her, playing Australian coverage of the US election.

I can’t believe it, she says. I lived in New York for twenty-seven years, and this just makes me so sad.

I think of my recent trip to the US, in the midst of the election campaign, and of the people I met there, the culture I barely glimpsed. I am sad too.

Is it milligrams or micrograms? she asks me.

What the doctor has written on the form is unclear.

Micrograms, I say.

Then she tightens the strap around my upper arm and pushes the tip of the needle through my skin and into a vein. The veins on my right arm are always bigger and easier to access. The needle burns. I watch the blood from my body fill the body of the syringe. Dark, coppery red. A result of the reaction between iron and oxygen inside the dark and mysterious parts of my body. Like rust.

Are you reading anything good at the moment? she asks me.

I laugh. Completely coincidentally, I’m reading a book called ‘Micrograms’.

She laughs too. I tell her it’s a book about small things. Small things that matter. About connections between things.

When she pulls the needle out of my arm, the very end of it catches the tiny thin edge of my skin. I feel the microscopic tear in my skin as a stinging sensation. Two tiny spots of my blood drop, one onto my arm and one onto the arm of the chair. I fight the urge to apologise and immediately wipe them up. Instead I watch them sit there, shining and wet and warm.

She syringes my blood into a vial. I have never seen it done this way before. Usually the vial is attached to syringe and the blood is collected directly. I do not ask her why she has done it differently, or why she is not concerned about my spilled blood.

The drops of my blood darken, thicken a little, against the outside air, reacting to the invisible oxygen around us.

Tarot cards are supposed to be all about seeing connections you might not otherwise, she says.

She rubs an alcohol swab over my arm, slowly back and forth across the pin prick in the crook of my elbow, and then, finally, down towards the outside of my elbow to wipe up the spilled blood on my arm. Last, almost as an afterthought, she swipes the swab over the drop of my blood on the furniture.

A cotton wool ball taped across the puncture wound, she sends me back out into the world with my tender elbow crook. I can feel the sticky tape pulling on the hairs on my arm, the memory of the burn of the needle running down along the veins and into my right hand.

The radio coverage of the election is the last thing I hear as she shuts the door behind me.

He is speaking about his family history and its ties to a part of Wales I have spent some time. The presentation is beautiful, and everyone in the room is spellbound by his descriptions of the objects from his family’s history and the deeply sad story they tell.

He describes walking recently down the road where his great grandfather had been found many many years ago, and marvelling at the wildness of the hedgerows, somehow chaotic and contained at the same time. I know these hedgerows. I have gazed at them up close in the same way this man I do not know describes doing.

He shows a picture of the hedgerows, and something odd happens to my heart. It wobbles a little, shaken by something like nostalgia, like grief, like the kind of sadness one feels for a friend going through a difficult time, except that the sadness is for a past version of myself.

When I wandered along those hedgerows it was summer. I wore gumboots and sometimes a rain jacket.

Sometimes I wandered as part of a little troupe, and we would sing each other silly songs, and pluck sticky weed, a plant I know as cleavers, from the hedgerow and stick it to one another. On these ventures I learned to recognise stinging nettle, and the other plants in the chaos of the hedgerow that would help ease the pain of a too-close encounter with the nettle. On one occasion, one of my wandering companions pointed out a delicate and tiny orchid, and told us all she knew about the plant.

Other times I wandered just with one other, often at dusk, my favourite time of day, and she and I would talk about the things that were making us sad, the answers we were trying to find in our lives. We would stop to look at the sun setting, and at cows in the fields. I’m not sure we found the answers, but I think what we grew between us on those evening walks along the hedgerows was some kind of hope—the kind of hope that a growing friendship feeds.

In Wales I also walked up a mountain, explored castles, dug potatoes, checked fields for molehills. I removed ivy from trees—an activity involving considerably more effort than that short phrase implies, with small axes and other tools, scrabbling through undergrowth and small branches, and as much brute strength as I could muster—and built and burned a bonfire. Of course, when I say “I” there, I really mean “we”.

Listening to this man’s presentation, a year after my own introduction to the hedgerows, I’m realise I’m finally beginning to understand the kind of room my heart made for the country I walked through then, and the people I walked with. I’m also seeing the depth of the fog that surrounded me at that time, and that perhaps it was a necessary buffer. As that fog has lifted, slowly, a gratitude for that time, those people, and that place has settled in its place.

Later, at the pub, this man and I talk very briefly about our different connections to the place in his presentation. He tells me he’s spent very little time there himself, but its presence has haunted his family in the generations that came after his great grandfather’s death. I tell him a little about my time there, and I’m struck by the way this place is associated with sadness in each of our stories, and with a shift in the direction those stories.

For him, this shift happened before he was born, and his exploration of it is in part an attempt to understand how it’s contributed to where he finds himself now. For me, this shift is something much more recent in my past, and I have a feeling that it will still be quite some time before I can see the impact it’s had on the wandering of my life.

All I know so far is that I think of the hedgerows, and those wanderings along them, often. They are vivid in my memory—the voices of my wandering companions, the soft quality of the light, the quiet of the countryside, the texture of the different plants, and the scent of them.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how things leave traces on us, and how those traces are not always obvious. Even when they’re felt, we can’t always understand what they really mean, or will mean. I may spend the rest of my life not fully understanding the traces left by the time I spent in Wales. And maybe this is what that man’s presentation showed me—that the traces of a place and things that happen in a place may be felt generations later, and perhaps still not understood.

Threads and spaces between have been concepts at the forefront of my mind for some time now. In my own talk at the conference where the man spoke about the Welsh hedgerows and his family, I spoke about sound as a medium that creates what sound theorist Brandon LaBelle calls ‘relational space’. This is an important argument for my thesis—and is both figuratively and literally true—but I also think that, at least figuratively, the same might be said for any of the senses. They are an opportunity to perceive relational spaces and to notice the threads that run through them.

I’m still not quite there in trying to understand my time in Wales and what it’s meant for me. The threads are still loose here. But maybe that’s an interesting point at which to pause, and just to notice the slack in the weave.

I think of my mother’s knitting. The way she weaves together threads of yarn over many hours, in stages, on and off, to make a garment; the way she unravels parts or all of that garment if the finished piece doesn’t quite work, and starts again.

The things she makes are always beautiful, for all that weaving and unravelling and re-weaving. Maybe I’m still unravelling Wales, so I can begin weaving again.

It is the end of the week. I’m extremely tired and have been for a long walk. On my way home, I have caught a woman coming out of a house with a wonderful garden behind the front fence and another on the verge, with sunflowers just starting to bloom. It is one of my favourite parts of this particular regular walking route.

Well, I planted it, yes, she says. She hesitates slightly.

I tell her how much I love it, how I admire it every time I walk past.

She relaxes. She is older than I am by maybe fifteen years. Her hair is short, neat, and dark—quite the opposite of mine: long, unruly, fair. Her face is friendly; eyes, bright. She smiles easily. She tells me about the garden’s history, the difficulties with the local council, the concerns of some of her neighbours. But also about her idea that a garden in this spot could be a small source of joy for passersby.

Do you garden? she asks me.

I do, I tell her, and bemoan the terrible soil in my front garden, which seems to want to grow almost nothing, no matter how much garden waste and compost and spent coffee grounds and green manure and mulch I throw at it. Unlike the back garden, which is overgrown, wild, and full of food. The front garden is a source of ongoing, quiet frustration for me; something almost always at the back of my mind, so that every now and then a possible solution pops into my head.

Have you tried sunflowers? she asks me, they seem to grow anywhere and everywhere, even in terrible soil.

I haven’t tried sunflowers.

She tells me about the garden behind her front fence, fairly well established now, that only two years ago would grow almost nothing because of low soil quality. But sunflowers grew just fine.

I could give you some seeds, she says, I’m sure I’ve got some lying around.

I think I probably I have some sunflower seeds lying around somewhere at home, so I don’t take her up on the offer this time. But we exchange names, and chat about work and households and takeaway dinners on a Friday night. I am struck for about the seven hundredth time since I began gardening just how unlikely it is that I would have met this complete stranger were it not for a garden and a curiosity in me that lends itself to friendliness—a trait that is no doubt amplified by the practice of gardening itself, where curiosity about a plant, a seed, the soil, becomes paying friendly attention: watching, listening.

We talk about succulents. About how many of the succulents in her verge garden have been grown from cuttings. I tell her about the giant jade plant on my parents’ front verandah, grown from a cutting given to my mum by an old housemate and dear friend of mine at the time we lived together.

She tells me to come and knock on her door if I realise I do need sunflower seeds.

I wander home thinking about cities and culture and agriculture and tending to plants; about how many conversations I have had with complete strangers because of a garden; and how the link between cities, culture, agriculture and sociability is so strong and so old that it’s almost invisible. Until someone sows some sunflower seeds on their front verge.

I have come to think of this last year, 2015, as the year I lost to grief.

Grief appeared at strange moments. Unexpected, it bubbled up from somewhere inside and filled me up. Sometimes it leaked, and wet my eyelashes, matting them together in shiny triangles at the edges of my eyes. Sometimes it seethed then raged, like the ocean withdrawing from the shore and the tidal wave that follows. There were days when the grief burned my cheeks with its saltiness.

This grief is old. It’s been waiting a decade or more for me to give it space. In that time, it’s trickled into spaces all through my body, looking for somewhere it can rest, leaving its mark along the way, like flood marks on a wall. It hasn’t found a home, in all that time. Nowhere to settle, just restlessness and the scars of constant movement.

When I started giving it space, I began dreaming more than I had in years. About loss, about continuing despite loss. Maybe because of it. Starting again, not from scratch, but from where I am. Something we all need to do.

The grief came to rest in my chest; the space that air from outside creates and then deflates inside my lungs. And I wonder now if this is where it wanted me to allow it to go, all this time, so I could breathe it out, let it go. Have I kept it trapped all these years, thinking all the while that it was me who was the prisoner?

Words travel on the exhale when a person speaks, but for much of last year this old grief of mine was only air and water, draughts and leaks.

Sounds, movement, silence.

The only words I could use to explain it were nebulous, vague.

Shapeless. Air and water.

Mine alone to hold and then release back into the world, to be unmade and remade, the way we all are; to become something else.

It is a very strange and somewhat distressing state of affairs to be someone who has called themselves a writer and to find that there are no words, or that there are only words that make no sense to anyone else, and to feel that you cannot really understand the words other people are using.

The year I lost to grief wasn’t completely lost, of course. I travelled, I worked, I loved. I made changes. I made new connections with people, more fully realised the depth of many old ones. I found that these people carried for me when I couldn’t a faith in me that I would find with time. I found, too, an immense gratitude, which I’m not sure there will ever be words enough to express, for this faith in me—especially because some of that faith came from people who didn’t have much beyond a hunch to go on.

These are words enough now for the grief though.

There is space where the grief once flooded everything else out. Space for joy and kindness and courage and playfulness. Space for all the things I thought I’d lost, but that had, in fact, just been learning how to swim.

It is the walking, and the muscle memory of it, the feeling of my feet inside my shoes and the ground underneath them, that allows me to remember other things about the places that—quite literally, it seems—etch themselves into me. I’m not sure I could come to love a place if I didn’t move through it.

In Paris I wore familiar sandals that collected dust and dirt, as did my feet. It was hot. My skin was always warm and slightly dusty. I was calm in Paris, alone. Comfortable in my dusty warm skin. I walked for hours in that city. In crowded places and quiet ones. I was isolated by my very minimal French, but often welcomed with a cheery ‘Bonjour’ or ‘Bonsoir’. I listened to the language like one might listen to music.

I bought very little in Paris, other than food and a couple of small gifts. I had only a small backpack with me. I was blissfully free of luggage; similarly, baggage.

In Edinburgh, I wore lace up shoes I’d bought in Ireland. Comfortable but still stiff while I wore them in. They made a pleasant click on the wide footpaths of the New Town, and held steady on the cobblestones of the Old Town. It was cold enough for a jacket and scarf in Edinburgh, though it was the beginning of summer.

I was sad in Edinburgh, but somehow simultaneously so pleased to be there. I fell in love with the architecture in that city—with a beauty that seemed to embrace the idea of dark edges. It helped me to embrace my own shadowy outlines, to allow the sadness just to be.

In the Scottish National Gallery I sat near a gallery tour group while the leader talked about a sculpture that looked from one angle like it was grimacing; from another, laughing. When the tour group moved on, I looked at the sculpture with a gallery security guard and another patron. I was the only one of the three of us who was tall enough to see the sculpture clearly from both angles. Only I could see the happy face too.

In the New Town I found a cafe down some stairs, below street level. It had black and white checkered floor tiles. I sat in the window with a book, not really reading, and instead looking up at the street. The slightly acidic, but also sweet smell of coffee, and the melody of Scottish accents.

I walked through galleries here, too, and castles and museums, and up a hill where I could look out over the city. I walked through my sadness, through my shadows. My feet were sore in Edinburgh, rather than dusty. My hair was wild, blown about by the wind.

It is the walking that helps me remember these places now, and myself in them. The residual feeling of one step after another, the sense of moving slowly through space. It is the walking that has imprinted in my mind some kind of map of these cities: incomplete, hazy, highly individual, perhaps inherently unshareable, but undoubtedly precious.